Nilsson

The Life of a Singer-Songwriter

Alyn Shipton

Written through an exclusive grant of access to Nilsson's papers by the Nilsson estate

Draws on interviews with Nilsson's friends, family and associates, and material drawn from an unfinished draft autobiography

Nilsson

The Life of a Singer-Songwriter

Alyn Shipton

Description

Paul McCartney and John Lennon described him as the Beatles' "favorite group," he won Grammy awards, wrote and recorded hit songs, and yet no figure in popular music is as much of a paradox, or as underrated, as Harry Nilsson.

In this first ever full-length biography, Alyn Shipton traces Nilsson's life from his Brooklyn childhood to his Los Angeles adolescence and his gradual emergence as a uniquely talented singer-songwriter. With interviews from friends, family, and associates, and material drawn from an unfinished autobiography, Shipton probes beneath the enigma to discover the real Harry Nilsson. A major celebrity at a time when huge concerts and festivals were becoming the norm, Nilsson shunned live performance. His venue was the studio, his stage
the dubbing booth, his greatest triumphs masterful examples of studio craft. He was a gifted composer of songs for a wide variety of performers, including the Ronettes, the Yardbirds, and the Monkees, yet Nilsson's own biggest hits were almost all written by other songwriters. He won two Grammy awards, in 1969 for "Everybody's Talkin'" (the theme song for Midnight Cowboy), and in 1972 for "Without You," had two top ten singles, numerous album successes, and wrote a number of songs--"Coconut" and "Jump into the Fire," to name just two--that still sound remarkably fresh and original today. He was once described by his producer Richard Perry as "the finest white male singer on the planet," but near the end of his life, Nilsson's career was marked by voice-damaging substance abuse and the
infamous deaths of both Keith Moon and Mama Cass in his London flat.

Drawing on exclusive access to Nilsson's papers, Alyn Shipton's biography offers readers an intimate portrait of a man who has seemed both famous and unknowable--until now.

Nilsson

The Life of a Singer-Songwriter

Alyn Shipton

Author Information

Alyn Shipton is the award-winning author of many books on music including A New History of Jazz, Groovin' High: the Life of Dizzy Gillespie, and Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab Calloway. He is jazz critic for The Times in London and has presented jazz programs on BBC radio since 1989. He is also an accomplished double bassist and has played with many traditional and mainstream jazz bands.

Nilsson

The Life of a Singer-Songwriter

Alyn Shipton

Reviews and Awards

2014 ARSC Award for best research in Popular Music

"Shipton... balances Nilsson's tragic story with exacting analysis of his talents and similarly detailed accounts of bacchanalian exploits with ex-Beatles and other bons vivants." --Rolling Stone

"An amazing tale." --Boston Globe

"Nilsson fans will appreciate this long awaited biography of an often neglected and underrated musician." --lBooklist

"The definitive work on the man who put the lime in the coconut."
-Houston Press

Nilsson

The Life of a Singer-Songwriter

Alyn Shipton

From Our Blog

By Alyn Shipton
Singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson worked in the computer department of a California bank throughout the early 1960s. For much of that time, he managed the night shift, clocking on in the early evening and finishing around 1 a.m. Then, instead of going to sleep, he wrote songs all night. Being a man of considerable energy, he spent the daytime hawking his songs around publishers.

By Alyn Shipton
(1) Harry nearly had no career at all after he accepted a dare as a teenager to slide down a fast running flume at Wofford Heights in California. After sliding down the waterway for several miles at high speed he narrowly escaped with his life by grabbing a metal bar above his head and hauling himself out of the rapid current.

By Alyn Shipton
When the first Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast in 1956, the BBC was so late in entering that it missed the competition deadline, so it was first shown in my native England in 1957. Nonetheless, it seems as if this curious example of pan-European co-operation, which started with seven countries and is now up to 40, has been around forever.